As things have progressed forward with my/our practice, I get taken back and aback by the old life story elements that reappear as having effected rewiring and other dimensions of the practice.
Here we begin at the beginning (from a post in a Community Poll):
I was a sickly child and a difficult birth, raised by my mother and nurses mostly for at least the first two years at times in quarantine. My father did not get to hold me until I was two or a little more. I was raised on doctor-prescribed phenobarbitol and atropine for my first six years and had abdominal surgery during that time. I suspect that those drugs over that time had probably pre-rewired me early in several ways!
I was very tall and thin for my age as I grew and was quite shy early, growing quite intellectually adventurous and outspoken in the later pre-puberty years. At one point I declared my interest in yoga and planned "to develop the skill of lowering my large bowel through my anus inside-out as the East Indians do to clean it". I was not strong and still ill on and off during those years and at school was bullied and taunted: "four-eyes!, girl!, fag! etc.", partly because my family were prominent businessmen and community leaders. This, even as I was dating a girl and partying with others before high school…
About this time I was sent to a boys summer camp for three summers, which covered the last full year of pre-puberty, the year of puberty itself and the first year of emerging from the transition year. This was 1959 -1961 I think. Sacked out in our tents in separate wooded sections of the site based on age, we all yacked about sex, in our ignorance, in the first two years. We went from being shy to occasional group nudity without is being sexual. One of the louder campers expounded at length on how he was going to "screw his girlfriend's ass" when he got back home, and meant her anus. I'm not sure he knew about vaginas at that point! Through the second year and into the third I suffered from serious ulcers and was treated for months with a medication that again had atropine as a significant ingredient. More chemical rewiring during puberty?!
I am not promoting any kind of psychoactive drug use, but some of my experiences lately seem connected to some of the effects I experienced in my youth in conjunction with the medical prescriptions above. More on this here soon. Gotta go now…